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190 Travel Sickness
exercise is voluntary movement only; and ‘voluntary’ is defined
in a way that separates the labouring from the leisured classes.
The work of carpenters, farmers, merchants, et al., is not a physical
exercise, since we do not observe voluntary movement, speaking
properly, but rather forced movement. Moreover, merchants, bourgeois,
and their like, walk a great deal, for long periods and over long
distances; but here too we are not dealing with a genuine physical
exercise. In order to have this one must walk at one’s own initiative.
Thus Bernard of Gordon in the fourteenth century. 44 Exercise
is for the few, not the many.
4. regimen for travellers
From travel as regimen, and the ways in which travel was
understood, I turn to regimen for travellers, the second of
my two themes. This is a topic on which, as I have indicated,
the Hippocratics and Galen have very little to contribute. As
the evidence comes down to us, the earliest we meet it is in the
fourth century ad. I have referred to Oribasius’ Medical Collections.
The relevant material is not there (at least not in the 25
books that survive out of an original 70) but in one of the two
Synopses of it that he later wrote. In the Synopsis addressed to
his son Eustathius, he includes short regimens for travellers on
foot (pros tas poreias) and for seafarers. 45 The context is this:
preceding sections on exercise for out-of-sorts ‘businessmen’
(derived from Galen’s De sanitate tuenda) and those with a
corruption of food in the stomach; succeeding sections on
drunkenness and sexual excess. In between the two regimens
is some advice taken from Erasistratus (fragment 158) 46 on how
to cope with a change of water. A train of thought is just
detectable in Oribasius’ layout and selection. From stomach
problems he moves to ‘the easiest way to depart on a journey
on foot’ (not, I submit, a ‘walking-tour’ as the passage’s new
editor-translator has it; that conjures up anachronistic
44
Regimen sanitatis, MS. Cues 508, f. 52vb, trans. Gil-Sotres, ‘Regimens of
Health’, 305.
45
Synopsis ad Eustathium 5.31, 33, ed. I. Raeder, CMG 6.3 (Leipzig and
Berlin, 1926), v. 166–8.
46
In Erasistrati fragmenta, ed. I. Garofalo (Pisa, 1988).